Fresh Or Foe: Why Isn’t Cooking Common Knowledge?

Before health can flourish, what a person eats needs to be under control.

The basis of health in general is what you put into your body, especially food! And the word of today is fresh, because microwaved, canned, frozen, and preserved foods don’t feed your body the same way. In fact, they can shorten your lifespan and give you disease. And here’s why….

First and most importantly, the very basics: animals and humans eat food to gain nutrition, which comes in the form of protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, water, and more.

Even in nature, there’s both fresh and old food, and every creature has its own specialization. Whether considered an animal or something completely different, humans specialize in fresh food. Unlike vultures, mushrooms, and hyenas, humans lack the ability to get healthy eating most rotten, spoiled, rancid, stinky old foods.

That’s common knowledge, right? So then why are people still eating old food?

The answer lies in difference of opinion; after all, most people consider food to be fresh if it’s been heated up recently. But this mode of thinking will slowly kill them.

Fresh food meets two criteria:

Not too long ago, it was alive. In some cases, like with your salad, it still is alive!

It’s only been cooked recently.

But before discussing what does and doesn’t meet the criteria above… what’s the problem with non-fresh food?

Vitamins and nutrients are sensitive to processing (freezing, canning, and preserving being examples). Yams and tomatoes, for example, might lose half of their antioxidant vitamin content as soon as they’re sealed in a can, and more as they sit on the shelf.

Puffed rice in cereal contains almost no vitamin E, whereas freshly cooked rice can be a good source.

And that lettuce you choke down at the buffet because it’s “good for you” has already lost 80% of it’s vitamin C by the time you get to it.

These are the types of nutrients in your food that keep you alive and disease-free… and they’re gone!

So why do you think the government requires so many foods to be “fortified” with man-made vitamins and minerals? The answer is simple: all of these old, processed foods that sit on the shelves waiting for you to buy them have considerably lower amounts of nutrition than fresh versions of the same thing. (There are other reasons, too, but that’s a long story for another time.)

Also and too, note that man-made vitamins are only good when they’re fresh. In other words, the label that says “30%” next to vitamin E literally means if you eat your corn flakes within a day of it leaving the factory, one serving will supply an estimated 30% of the vitamin E you need to be healthy for that day. How many of us actually do that? (And that’s not all; there are tons of scams and tricks like that in your grocery store!)

So when using the word “old,” I’m not only talking about rotten eggs and road kill.

Old food is anything that’s been processed with heat, stuffed on a shelf, frozen, canned, preserved with chemicals, treated with radiation (unbelievably, a real thing…), or manufactured in any way that’s intended to make it seem more fresh, when it’s likely weeks, months, or even years old, quite dead, and very low in nutrition.

And don’t think unhealthy “old” food is only sold to you at grocery stores. I’m sure we’ve all heard something about fast foodbeing bad for us.

But what exactly is fast food? Whenever we’re talking about health, fast food is pretty much anything you get from a restaurant, whether it’s a buffet, drive-through – or even a fancy steak place.

Few restaurant foods are categorically healthy, and that includes so-called “natural” and “healthy” options!

Anyone who’s worked at one of these places can tell you where a majority of their food comes from. Except for the absolute fanciest restaurants (we’re talking 5-star gourmet here), most food is going to be ordered from one of three or four big ingredient suppliers.

And, can you guess the type of food they supply? Packaged, frozen, heavily preserved, chemical-laden foods that are so far from being fresh that, just like the grocery store foods, have lost half or more of their life-giving vitamins and healthy nutrients.

And it gets way worse: government-required cleaning and preparation methods are responsible for the presence of dangerous sanitizing chemicals, insecticides, soaps, and waxes – among other things – being present in your restaurant food.

With few exceptions, health laws are very forgiving for big businesses. So are advertising laws. Actually, laws in general permit big businesses to do a lot of what they please, including lying.

As only one tiny example, I’ll end the article with the following: one “fine dining” chain claims their food is “made from scratch,” is “handmade,” and is an “exceptional value.” They brag about their “high quality food” which they claim is sold at a “reasonable price.” (All their own quotes.) One of the founders is a graduate with a B.A. in health, physical education, and recreation. The problem with this? Well, here’s an employee-confirmed list of ingredients for one of their “homemade” condiments:

The only fresh ingredient is the cheese… and even cheese is aged! And this is no joke! This restaurant chain is pretty big. Estimating the cost of everything, if you wanted to make this yourself and sell it for $4.99 per serving like they do, at 28 servings per batch, you would be making $126 profit… for an appetizer!

So their claims – made from scratch, handmade, exception value, reasonable price, high quality, and homemade – are a bit misleading. After every ingredient has been subjected to heating, freezing, canning, and processing three or more times, preserved with cancer-causing sulfites and chemicals, and possibly reheated as leftovers, how much nutrition do you think will have survived? Would you feed your growing children this sort of thing, knowing that in the future their bodies might hit the breaking point and fall apart because of hidden mineral and vitamin deficiencies?

This junk isn’t high quality food, and it’s not fresh or healthy, no matter what the TV says.

I invite you all to take a step back and really investigate what’s going on with your food. The lesson to be learned here is that real homemade food, made with fresh plants, boiled grains, and un-preserved meat, is healthier. Homemade food brings families closer and feeds them better, even if some of the ingredients are less than ideal. You can’t be perfect – but if no effort is put forth at all, say goodbye to your health!